Mixing concrète

For the commitment-phobic, music festivals can be a dreadful chore. Beyond committing to paying extortionate ticket prices and suffering the indignity of queuing for backlogged bogs, there is the realisation that music is now so homogenous it can be programmed like TV channels and consumed like fast food.

For the most part, large festivals serve music on a plate, as a fait accompli, ready to be consumed but over-cooked and rarely presenting anything indelicate or challenging. Those who prefer their music a la carte are advised to explore Berlin's Club Transmediale.

Held over nine days every January, Club Transmediale bills itself as a 'festival for adventurous music and related visual arts'. It is the music component of the larger festival Transmediale - a symposium on experimental arts and media that includes performance, screenings and panels. Club Transmediale promotes itself under the banner 'Unpredictable'. Anyone walking into the opening show of this year's festival last Friday night would probably concur.

Instead of musical instruments, the stage at the Volksbühne (the imposing former arts palace of East Berlin) featured artfully placed stacks of illuminated speakers, arranged in perfect symmetry. The artist - a man wth a shock of white hair and a garish red sports jacket - sat in the audience, hunched over a spot-lit mixing desk.

Pierre Henry is an 80-year old composer of musique concrète who has been rediscovered in recent years by dance musicians. Psyché Rock, a brain-blasting piece of electronic psychedelia from the 1967 score Henry composed for an avant-garde ballet by Maurice Béjart, was remixed by Fatboy Slim and ended up as the theme tune for Matt Groening's Futurama.

Henry's playfully-animated music doesn't need a visual component to convince you how futurist it is - hence the unorthodox stage set-up. For two hours he sent sound (concrète and otherwise) whizzing around the auditorium, constantly moving, shifting and pulsing like an audial hallucination - 4/4 beats clashed with nature sounds and string sections danced alongside abstract electronic bleeps. This was 3D sound for real, not the B-movie marketing gimmicks employed by Bono and U2 to jazz up their half-assed mongoloid rock.

Everyone should try to attend a performance by Henry at least once. It's the kind of experience you emerge from believing you will never quite hear sounds in the same way again. Attendance should be mandatory for every every indie rock musician, just so they realise the utter futility of their existence.

Also that evening, at another venue across town, was a show by booty funk impresarios Detroit Grand Pubahs. They claim to be not from Detroit at all but from Buttopolis - it's not on Google Maps but (according to the band) the directions are a cinch: 'just head for Uranus then make a right at the first two moons'. The Pubahs have an enviable talent for writing songs about sandwiches and onions that are positively obscene.

The following night at Maria Am Ostbahnhof, a medium-sized warehouse club by the River Spree, a DJ spins techno (of the 'bangin' variety) on stage in the main room, as warm-up for a performance by UK band Chrome Hoof - a 10-piece ritualistic disco outfit, who wear matching silver lame cowls, and thrash out a rather unconvincing mash of Afro-beat, Black Metal, prog and funk.

Moving through the club, past the 'smoking room' where hipsters guzzle tobacco behind a glass-fronted wall - by and large, Berliners are still nonchalantly ignoring the European smoking ban - there is a chill-out room occupied by a large Armoured Personel Carrier built from wood. Snaking around a few more passages, you come to another room given over entirely to 1950s rock'n'roll. Pastoral alpine scenes unspool on a projection screen behind a stage set-up with two drum-kits, one of which will soon be hammered by a German one man-band-cum-preacher called Reverend Beatman, whose chief inspiration is the the late great Hasil Adkins.

The main attraction in this room was to be the Legendary Stardust Cowboy - the man from whom Ziggy took his name. A genuine oddball from Buddy Holly's hometown Lubbock, Texas, the Stardust Cowboy is a country musician who sings songs about outer and inner space - his one and only 1968 hit is called 'Paralyzed'. The 60-year-old cowboy had apparently asked to play as late as possible, preferring his audience to be well and truly soused by the time he took the stage. And that, he no doubt got, when he appeared at 5am in the morning, long after this reporter had called it a night.